Fibre Channel is the name of an integrated set of standards developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) which defines new protocols for flexible information transfer. Fibre channel is an open industry standard serial interface for high speed systems. One can view fibre channel simply as a transport vehicle for the supported command set (usually SCSI commands). In fact, fibre channel is unaware of the content of the information being transported. It simply packs data in frames, transports them to the appropriate devices, and provides error checking. It is also called Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL).
One popular connector interface is a single connector attachment SCA. The SCA interface was designed to provide a standard connection for systems using hot-swappable drives. The original SCA was followed by a second version called the SCA2, which includes alignment posts for grounding on the SCA2 plug and cavities on the SCA2 receptacle for receiving those posts. Unless otherwise specified, the use of the term SCA2 here includes both the original SCA as well as its descendant, the SCA2. Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) is the current high end CPU-to-drive interface. SCA2 interface drives connect to a SCSI backplane that provides power, configuration settings such as SCSI ID, and termination of the SCSI bus. An SCA2 adapter is necessary to attach an SCA2 interface drive to a standard SCSI host adapter. An SCA2 adapter should provide power and termination as well as jumper settings for SCSI ID and other drive features. Some drive models may offer configuration options on the drive.
State-of-the-art fibre channel drives come with a single connector adapter. This SCA2 has 40 connections. Other numbers of contacts are also common: 80, 120, etc.
There is no adapter which allows one to connect a fibre channel drive to anything but an SCA2 receptacle.